The Spoken Word
by RainbowPuppetBoy
Summary: We've been infected. But we've continued to exist together. Until those four monsters show up. SmokerxHunter, shonen-ai, character death.


**The Spoken Word**

I don't even know what it is with me and random angsty song-fics.

Anyway, this is written to AFI's "The Spoken Word", one of the "hidden tracks" on their album Sing the Sorrow. It plays shortly after "...But Home Is Nowhere".  
Look it up on YouTube.

Really random fanfic/songfic (poetry fic?) of SmokerxHunter. Because they're one of my L4D OTPs.  
:I So shoot me, I like Zombie love.

**WARNING: **Yeah, it's yaoi (err...shonen-ai, really). Take a breather guys, and leave if you don't like it. I understand that this is "lyke, ttly, nawt cannon! DDDD:" or whatever (maybe it's AU?). I will write as I please, thanks. If you don't like it, ignore it and move on.  
Thank you.

* * *

_We held hands on the last night of earth._

The city was burning. We could see it from the top of the hill, both of our faces showing how tired we were. We'd fought our way through the insanity of what was happening, knowing- no, hoping -that somewhere beyond these fields was a place of safety. Somewhere that was nothing like this illness ridden city.  
He took my hand and gave a reassuring squeeze. With my smoke-stung eyes I turned from the orange and yellow light of our once home to look at the taller male. He nodded his head to the side, showing that it was time for us to go. My hand still in his, he turned, leading me along the ridge of the hill. With one last glance over my shoulder at the city, I frowned, almost feeling sad that we were leaving it behind.  
It was no longer our home.

_Our mouths filled with dust, we kissed in the fields and under trees, screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves._

We walked for a long while, the glow of the city now behind us and the edge of the city to our right. Breathing a dry sigh, he sat down under a large oak tree, pulling me down with him. We were tired of walking, tired of running. I laid back into the dirt, breathing heavily and ignoring the leaves tickling at my nose.  
My eyes hurt, my body ached, and my throat was dry. But that was forgotten when he moved to lay beside me, distracting me from my hurt with a kiss. It was gentle and chaste at first, soon deepening into something more. Heat and passion, needy and desperate. As if this kiss would erase everything. I only wished that everything that'd happened could be erased by this show of affection.  
His arm wrapped around my middle, pulling me closer, holding me tighter. My scream broke the kiss and cut the night air. He pulled away, seeming alarmed with my reaction. His eyes widened as he noticed just what it was that had made me scream. His hand was covered with blood. My blood. It was dark against the orange and red hues of the fall leaves as it bled through my dark blue hoodie.  
The look that he gave me was the silent question; **'you were bitten?'**.

_It was empty on the edge of town but we knew everyone floated along the bottom of the river._

It was silent after my scream, something that we could both breath sighs of relief for. It hadn't attracted anything unwelcome. I was wrapped with the torn hem of his dark green over-shirt. A sad hope that it would stop the bleeding.  
And then…we continued to walk.  
We walked along the bank of the river, hoping it'd lead us far from here. But at the edge of the city borders we noticed something. It made our stomachs drop. There were bodies in the river. The river was more than likely carrying the illness as well.

_So we walked through the waste where the road curved into the sea and the shattered seasons lay, and the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease._

It was as if the illness not only effected human beings, but it effected the environment as well. It was all broken. All dead. Or maybe it was the seasons changing. Fall was upon us, and the bared trees made me feel just as vulnerable.  
The sky opened up above us, the moon shining down and showing through the fog that we were at the edge of a lake. At the bright reflection of the moon shining down on the lake, I covered my eyes and fell to my knees. They were so sensitive. What I believed to be simple irritation from the smoke was now found to be part of the sickness that I now carried. Who knew it would carry so quickly?  
I was picked up, pulled into his arms. I hid my face in his chest, the terrible smell of smoke and rot seemed to cling to him. He had the disease as well… It was a voice inside that told me this. He had the sickness. My sickness. He must have gotten it from kissing me or from touching my blood.  
I looked up at him in question, barely squinting against the glare of the moon shining into my super-sensitive retinas.  
He paused a moment to nuzzle against my cheek, whispering something to me.

_In our cancer of passion you said, "Death is a midnight runner."_

With that sentence, I knew that he would die with me.

_The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide. We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes of stars that wore like an antique wedding dress._

And he did. As my life finally withered away and my immune system crumbled under the Green Flu, so did his.  
But now, though we were dead, we still lived. Cursed with these lacerations and boils on our skin. Almost like lepers. Only now instead of being the hunted, I was now the Hunter, and the smell of smoke on him was a permanent and comforting scent despite it's near-rancid residual smell.  
It was as if we picked up where we'd left off. Only now we had new-found confidence. The new city was also overrun. Instead of with flesh tearing monsters, it was with people like us.

Things were subject to change, though. And soon there were monsters in the city. Four of them. Ones that we had not come upon before. They were noisy and crude. We weren't sure what to think of them.  
We feared them.  
So in retaliation of them killing the others like us, we attacked.

_The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn as the ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop. The few insects skittered away in hopes of a better pastime._

I worked off of my sense of smell and hearing, while he worked with his mutated and elongated tongue. My heart hammered in my chest as I landed on one, this one smelling and sounding feminine. Instinct kicked in and my claws were buried into her flesh. There was another shout somewhere to my left telling me that he had gotten one of these loud creatures as well.  
Moments later, though, there was an explosion of pain at the side of my head as one of the loud manlier smelling ones hit me with something. I fell off to the side with a yelp. I was afraid, but my instincts told me to jump again while my rational side told me to run. Within a few seconds I was growling and preparing to jump again.  
I could hear and smell exactly where they were as they tried to get away, shouting to one another. There was a deafening bang. And the shout after it made my skin crawl. Instead of pouncing again, I turned tail and fled.  
Their scent was gone behind a large metal door.

_I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom and asked if you would accompany me in a quick fall, but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't good for two._

It was easy for me to jump up the walls with short growls as I went. I reached him quickly, panting as I crawled across the rooftop he'd been standing on. But, now, he wasn't standing. As I came to his side I could smell something else besides his usual scent of smoke.  
Something was wrong.  
With a little growl as if to ask what was wrong, I leaned in to find his lips with my own. It was sloppy, but it got my point across. It was a plea. **'Please get up.'** My growl made a worried sound to portray more of the sentence I so wished I could say, **'We can run again. Come with me. We can fall.'**  
A cough was the only answer to my soft growling. Then I felt a hand encircle my wrist, pulling it down to where I felt it. I knew I should have recognized the smell. Not quite as strong as his other scents, but the smell was there.  
It was blood.

_I rode alone. You said, "The cinders are falling like snow."_

I could feel his smile against my ear as he whispered something to me, and then… I was alone. Nothing was burning, nothing produced cinders. It was the snow.  
The last thing that he would ever see for me.

_There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty, bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence. Of blue and grey._

Now, the only sound was my shriek of despair, crying out my anger and sadness to the sky. That scream was joined by others in the distance, others like myself giving their mourning as well. It was a sickening, yet beautiful sound.

_Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carved our names in the flesh of the city. The sun has stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon and the darkness is a mystery of curves and lines._

Giving one last howl to the sky, I rubbed at the empty sockets where my eyes used to be. From the silence and scent of cold, I knew that the sun was going down. But it seemed to be frozen, every thing was frozen.  
It was dark. But, then… It was always dark for me. Everything was always mysterious to me.  
The city knew of what happened. The city knew my name. And the city mourned for me.

_Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward, and somewhere in the middle in the wilderness we found salvation scratched into the earth like a message._

Soon, I too stopped moving. Though I'd tried to get away many times, I found myself back on that same rooftop. My body still and my senses tired.  
The sky was empty to me. We laid silently.  
I felt consciousness slip.  
There, waiting for me was him.  
And waiting for us, was what we'd searched for all along.  
Salvation.


End file.
